Authors: Giles MacDonogh
After the Reich (124 page)
(1887-1954). Avenarius was an expressionist painter famed for his illustrations to Hauptmann’s works.
Compare Eisenhower, below p. 227.
The poet walked in the woods near by, as the town belonged to Weimar. It was here he wrote ‘Über allen Gipfeln’.
Mendelssohn’s music had been taken out of mothballs by Leo Borchard. See above p. 120.
And future: it is now the popular Hotel Bogota.
The process of humiliating the great conductor was admirably dramatised in Ronald Harwood’s play
Taking Sides
.
A modernistic cinema constructed in the 1920s. It is still there, although it was severely altered in the 1960s.
From which it was evicted when the building returned to its original owners in 1995.
Not to be confused with the Colonel Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. Colonel Sanders was a ‘Kentucky Colonel’, a purely honorary rank he shares with the author.
In her earlier and more respectful volume,
Eisenhower was my Boss
(235), she says the office was ‘large enough for an auditorium’.
Or one of them: see below Chapter 19
The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy
.
It is a moot point whether the CSU is really seen as anything other than a Catholic Bavarian force.
They were popular with the ‘lofty animals’ of the Party: Martin Bormann had one in his house in Berchtesgaden and Goebbels one in his Berlin home.
In Zuckmayer’s case the question was whether he was still a German, and whether he would consider coming back to Germany to live.
See below p. 390.
Under Salic Law a woman could not inherit the throne of Hanover.
There may be a case for seeing a Carthusian ‘mafia’ at the heart of British Military Government. Robert Birley (see below) had been headmaster of Charterhouse since 1935.
The former Ulrich Holländer, son of the Berlin writer Felix Holländer. As a Jewish refugee he had served in the British Pioneer Corps.
See below Chapter 20.
The Americans were eventually allotted Tulln, the French Götzendorf and the British the partial use of Schwechat - now the main airport for the city. Eventually the British and the French shared Schwechat.
They were
all
citizens of Austria-Hungary before 1918.
Schärf was also from Nikolsburg.
The Kanaltal along the Fella river, around the now Italian town of Tarvisio; for Gottschee see p. 503.
A lot of this would have been formerly Jewish owned.
Clark says this was Koniev, but Koniev had yet to be appointed.
There were an estimated 9,000 unburied bodies in the city (Adolf Schärf,
Österreichs Wiederaufrichtung im Jahr 1945
, Vienna 1960, 24).
See below p. 309.
These establishments lived on to the 1960s, possibly later, providing the Viennese with wholesome food at subsidised prices.
The pun just about works in English: ‘Viennese old-timers and Viennese without timers, vote ÖVP!’ The Russians had stolen their watches.
When Holly Martins goes to the Russian 2nd Bezirk to flush out his friend Harry Lime in
The Third Man
, men can be seen clearing rubble by the Reichsbrücke. It is not said whether they were Nazis.
A plebiscite carried out in the wake of the Treaty of Saint-Germain on 10 October 1920 had given the region to Austria.
See below pp. 368-9.
Douaumont was one of the bloodiest battles in the Verdun campaign; Langemarck near Ypres witnessed the killing of the flower of German youth in October and November 1914.
Zuckmayer exaggerates. Such figures were certainly to be seen on Berlin’s Sophienstrasse after 1918.
He had forgotten Erich Kleiber.
Given that at a national level the police was
gleichgeschaltet
, or incorporated in the SS, Clay’s figures seem conservative.
See below p. 508.
See below p. 455.
The ‘Volksgerichthof’ in Nazi times had tried the enemies of the state. There were no appeals and frequent death sentences.
See below Chapter 16.
The jewellery has been consumed as butter, The Meissen cups are worn as shoes. Behold the new man step out the gutter, Ancient heirlooms put to better use.
The Tauschzentral was a sort of pawn shop where goods were exchanged for money or food, an official version of the black market, established in all four zones. It was hoped that its presence would gradually eliminate the latter. Unfortunately, however, the Tauschzentral would neither sell food nor accept it in payment for goods.
In 1999 an assistant director of the Hermitage in St Petersburg told the author that the pictures were still there, and that they had been in the museum from the day they were removed from Germany. It was not Russian policy to give them back.
Now the Bode Museum. It was in the Soviet Sector.
Almost certainly Langwasser. See below p. 403.
The Russians were quite capable of doing this too: at Katyn they murdered a large percentage of the Polish officer corps.
In the British Library, for example, the books are stored under the ‘Cup’ shelfmark, normally reserved for pornography, and users of the books are required to sit at a special table where they can be monitored more closely.
For Rheinwiesenlager and Rheinberg, see below pp. 398-400.
Incidentally a very National Socialist method of preventing anyone from opting out of difficult decisions.
Schwerin von Krosigk was a ministerial director - or under-secretary of state - in Brüning’s government. He entered the cabinet under Papen.
See below p. 413.
MI5 had another interrogation centre at Latchmere House in the London suburbs - Camp 020. This was commanded by Colonel Robin Stephens until his transfer to Bad Nenndorf.
See above pp. 305-7.
The verb to ‘resettle’ had a particularly lethal significance when the Nazis applied it to the Jews.
This went back to the First World War. There was generally a certain empathy between Germans and black American troops. See above pp. 241-2.
The word
Wackes
, meaning an imbecile, was responsible for the so-called Zabern Incident in 1913, when the German army’s treatment of the Alsatian locals led to mass demonstrations, and there was a vote of no-confidence in the German chancellor in the Reichstag.
See above p. 224.
Sir Bernard Freyberg’s bombing of the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino killed around 400 Italian civilians who had taken refuge there, and not one German.
Information from Blair Worden, August 2004: Worden is Lord Dacre’s literary executer.
The Last Days of Hitler
was not intended for publication and Trevor-Roper was surprised when British intelligence consented. Any interrogations he carried out were concerned with the report. They had nothing to do with collecting evidence for Nuremberg or other trials.
Göring had been left the medieval castle by Hermann von Epenstein, the Jewish doctor who was his mother’s lover and Hermann’s godfather. Hermann’s Christian name was most probably in homage to the doctor and freshly minted nobleman. David Irving,
Göring: A Biography
, London 1989, 26-7.
The castle was owned by Hermann Fegelein’s brother Waldemar. Hitler’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein had been executed in the Chancellery garden a few days before. The castle was teeming with further SS men, something calculated to make Göring no more comfortable.
In June 1940, Göring told Hitler he had had two Catholic priests sent to a concentration camp because they had failed to rise when he entered a Rhineland inn. He gave orders that they should have to give the Nazi salute to one of his old caps every day. Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds,
Das Buch Hitler
, Bergisch Gladbach 2004, 123.
Those who had enforced the ban on the NSDAP were singled out for particularly harsh treatment: politicians, judges and the guards at the Corporate State’s own concentration camp at Wöllersdorf in Lower Austria. The hangman who had executed the Nazi participants in the assassination of chancellor Dolfuss in 1934 did not survive the first night in Dachau. See Bruno Heilig,
Men Crucified
, London 1941.
Horthy had been Hitler’s ally, but Hitler had had him deposed after he started negotiating with the Allies. One reason why the two fell out was Horthy’s refusal to ‘deport’ Hungary’s large Jewish population. Hitler had him interned in 1944. He did not return to Hungary and died in Estoril, Portugal in 1957.
Blomberg had been out of the picture since January 1938, and had not even played a role in the Anschluss. Hitler managed to push him out of the way when it was discovered that he had married a former prostitute. His conscience cannot have been said to be clear, however, as it was he who brought the army in behind Hitler, in recompense for the murder of Röhm and the others who would have had the SA take over from the traditional Wehrmacht. The Night of the Long Knives had seen the killing of army officers as well, but Blomberg was happy to celebrate its success with a slap-up meal with Göring at Horcher’s restaurant in Berlin.
Blaskowitz’s suicide is odd for the fact that he was one of the few generals to file a formal complaint about the activities of the SS, in this case after the invasion of Poland. There was a rumour that he did not take his life at all, but was murdered by SS men.
Papen remembered things differently:
he
was third, after Schacht and Speer. Streicher came last, ‘a position which could have been occupied by almost any of the other Gauleiters’. (Franz von Papen,
Memoirs
, London 1952, 547.) Speer, on the other hand, recalled that it was Seyss who had won the intelligence competition. He modestly concealed his own place in the line-up. (Albert Speer,
Spandau: The Secret Diaries
, London 1976, 9.)
He was murdered by the IRA in 1979.
The
Berliner Zeitung
reported that it had taken Ribbentrop 14 minutes 45 seconds to die, and Jodl a little longer. Ruth Andreas Friedrich,
Schauplatz Berlin
, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 148.
A spring festival to commemorate a plot to massacre the Jews.
Kesselring’s sentence was commuted to life. Both he and List were released in 1952.
There must have been some truth in these allegations. When the author was living in France in the early 1980s he met two people who had witnessed massacres carried out by Allied troops: a man who had been eighteen at the time, and a woman who had been a child of six. She had run out of the house to find British paratroops bayoneting German POWs in her garden. A British friend of the author’s who had studied at Heidelberg before the war and was intelligence officer to his regiment, told him that he was unable to interrogate a single prisoner after the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, because the British soldiers had killed the lot.
See above p. 70.
Eisenhower’s secretary - and mistress - Kay Summersby says the medals were handed to the Western Allies in Frankfurt, when Zhukov returned their visit.
In German they are called the Lausitzer or Görlitzer Neisse and the Glatzer Neisse. The Glatzer Neisse joins the Oder at Schurgast in Upper Silesia, the Polish Skorogoszcz. In Polish the river is called the Kłodzka.
The part of the Yalta Agreement would result in the deaths of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs.
The population east of the Bug was mixed, and the Poles were not intending to permit any Germans to remain east of the Oder-Neisse. This way the problem of racial minorities was solved.
Any areas where there had been substantial minorities of Poles were awarded to Poland at Versailles.
At the beginning of June there were 800,000 Germans left in East Prussia and 65 per cent of the Germans were still in Silesia. Half the Germans in Pomerania had moved out, but only 30 per cent of those in Brandenburg. In the Sudetenland only 3 per cent had left so far. (Gerhard Ziemer,
Deutsche Exodus: Vertreibung und Eingliederung von 15 Millionen Ostdeutsche
, Stuttgart 1973, 87-8).
Polish-East German agreement was not made until 1951 when an accord was signed in a villa in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. The place later became the House of German-Soviet Friendship and a plaque was set up to mark the spot. It was one of the few restaurants in Frankfurt when the author ate there on 17 August 1991, the day of the Moscow Coup. Bewildered Soviet soldiers wandered around the garrison.
Soljankasuppe
seemed appropriate: it was the one culinary contribution made by the Russians in the long years of occupation.